He laid out the spray disinfectant, hemostatic agent, antibiotic ointment, and foam dressing on the table in the order he’d use them. As a final touch, just for a change of mood, he took today’s stolen goods out of the leather pouch and arranged them where he could see them.
Various pieces of jewelry set with diamonds, sapphires, and emeralds, along with a white jade carving the size of a palm, caught the light and glittered. Gangwoo planned to fence them and put together his retirement fund. And yet looking at them didn’t improve his mood much.
“Maybe the music’s the problem……”
Gangwoo set down the disinfectant spray before he’d gotten around to using it and pushed himself to his feet. Come to think of it, a melody clinging desperately to a lover who was trying to leave was hardly fitting for this moment — a moment swelling with the dream of retirement. The music really was the problem.
He swapped out the record. The warm crackle faded and out flowed a bird-like saxophone solo. It was Charlie Parker’s “Bluebird.” The light, buoyant bebop rhythm felt like the future he was dreaming of. His mood lifted a little.
He returned to the chair, tended to his wound, and fixed his eyes on the spoils in front of him. The most valuable piece was the white jade carved in the shape of a goldfish. A relic from the latter half of the seventeenth century, the Qing dynasty era — appraised at a hundred billion won. Sell it right, and it would resolve every problem Gangwoo had and still leave roughly sixteen billion eight hundred million won to spare.
He intended to use that money to buy a single-story house with a garden and a red pickup truck. He hadn’t scouted out a specific location, but ideally it would be a place where, if you woke up in the morning and stepped into the living room, you’d see a beach lined with palm trees. And he would adopt a fluffy white dog from a shelter.
The goldfish carved to incorporate the reddish impurities in the jade — what might be considered the piece’s one flaw — was, in essence, Gangwoo’s severance pay. The only dream he could afford to imagine at this point was a modest one, but a smile lingered at the corners of his mouth all the same. The pleasant fantasy, however, didn’t last long.
The white bath towel draped across his thigh was slowly being dotted with red, like crimson spots on the crown of a fish’s head. Blood from a nosebleed was streaming steadily down his chin.
“Damn aspirin.”
Gangwoo muttered the curse again. The nosebleed was also the illness’s doing. He had put off the treatment he was supposed to receive on a weekly cycle by two days because of the heist schedule. And now his body was sending the signal that it couldn’t hold on any longer. He used to manage over two weeks; now he’d barely scraped through ten days.
“Maybe I’m getting old.”
He rubbed the back of his neck and got to his feet. At the small sink mounted against one wall of the living room, he scooped cold water with his hand and poured it onto the back of his neck.
The amount of blood that had come down turned out to be more than he’d expected. It suddenly occurred to him that his nose had bled at the scene of the robbery as well.
It shouldn’t have left a trace. It was dark enough that you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face, and even if a few drops had hit the floor, they’d have been ground to nothing under the police officers’ boots. He washed the unease away along with the blood.
He poured the untouched beer down the sink and put the first aid kit away. He went to the bedroom with a bloodstained bath towel wrapped around his waist, and came back out a moment later in nothing but a pair of loose grey jersey pants.
First, he locked the white jade carving and jewelry inside the safe, then gathered the clothes scattered on the floor and stuffed them all into the washer-dryer combo. Watching the evidence of a crime tumble around in a slow circle, he made a firm resolution to go to the hospital first thing when he woke up tomorrow.
* * *
D-14.
Gangwoo’s eyes opened at eight-thirty in the morning. He downed a cup of cold tap water in one go and went to the bathroom to wash up.
Scrubbing behind his knees, his groin, and behind his ears with a bath sponge; washing his hair; and shaving off the rough stubble that had grown overnight — all of it took a little over ten minutes. Every movement Gangwoo made was as precise and economical as his body.
He put on a white fisherman’s shirt and faded straight-cut jeans, and shoved his feet into a pair of Converse without untying them. From the safe where he’d stored last night’s stolen goods, he took out eight bundles of fifty-thousand-won notes — a hundred bills to a bundle — and crammed them into his pant pockets.
Two bundles in each side pocket, one in each back pocket — and then there was no more room. He stuck the remaining two, bold as you like, into the front breast pocket of his shirt. In the old district, no one dared pick a fight with Gangwoo, so he could get away with it.
Two bundles remained inside the safe. Ten million won — his entire life savings. He pulled one more bundle out and slipped it into a white envelope. On it, he wrote the word offering in black permanent marker. His total assets had just shrunk to five million won.
Finally, he hooked a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses onto his nose and headed out. This too was because of the illness.
If Gangwoo looked at sunlight with the naked eye, he blacked out on the spot. His doctor had given him a lengthy explanation, but he’d forgotten most of it. Something about how, as a side effect of the treatment, his optic nerves and brain had become hypersensitive to a particular wavelength of sunlight. Being sick was quite an inconvenience.
It was the end of August, and the sun was scorching even in the morning. Gangwoo walked along the main road, stopped by a cathedral to drop the envelope in the mailbox, then turned back. He walked on along the road and, at an open restaurant, bought a bowl of milmyeon and a bowl of hangover soup.
For the milmyeon, he asked them specifically to leave out the seasoning and sprinkle sugar on it instead. The owner looked puzzled and asked him what the appeal was, but he let her words go in one ear and out the other, and didn’t forget to ask that the noodles and broth be packaged separately so the noodles wouldn’t go soggy.
Carrying food that was ill-suited for breakfast, he made his way to an old clinic bearing the sign “Kim Internal Medicine.” This was where Gangwoo received treatment for his illness once a week.
Strictly speaking, it couldn’t really be called treatment. What he underwent was nothing more than halting the disease’s progression for a week at a time. When the medication wore off, his lungs and respiratory system would slowly begin to necrotize, and in the worst case, he could be dead within a matter of days.
Gangwoo was Jerry — the thief who made the wealthy of Hangdong tremble — and at the same time, a man on borrowed time, renewing his lease on life one week at a time.
He rang the doorbell with the bag of food hanging from one hand.
Beep. The noise, like something a fluorescent light ballast with a faulty connection might make, grated faintly on his nerves. No response from the occupant. Beeeeep. He held the bell down for roughly twice as long as before, and still — silence.
“Passed out drunk again, I see.”
Gangwoo looped the plastic bag around his wrist and rubbed his palm against his thigh. He put a hand on the two-meter brick wall and vaulted clean over it, using the impact of landing to spring upward. He scaled the ivy and the gas pipe up to the second floor in an instant, and with the slightly-grown pinky nail of his left hand, popped open the window latch.
He flung the window open wide. Sure enough, just as he’d expected. The director of Kim Internal Medicine — Gangwoo’s attending physician — was asleep among a pile of beer cans. The smell of alcohol hit him sharply.
“Good moooorning!”
He stepped down into the room — one that looked as though taking off shoes before entering was pointless. Gangwoo called out, dragging the last syllable long. Hanmin burrowed deeper into the pile of cans heaped on the bed with a low, muffled groan, like a gudgeon fish burying itself in a riverbed.
“Morning! Morning, morning! Mor-ning!”
Gangwoo called out morning in every variation he could think of while kicking the bed. Beer cans came clattering to the floor in an avalanche. Dust puffed up and the noise was tremendous.
Only then did Hanmin crack one eye open. He spoke gruffly to Gangwoo, who was grinning and shaking the plastic bag at him.
“……What is it? Is it night already?”
Kim Internal Medicine — whose primary clientele were those who couldn’t visit a clinic during normal hours — operated from nine in the evening until three in the morning. Gangwoo typically visited within those hours as well.
“No, it’s morning.”
“What?”
Narrowing his already-slitted eyes even further, Hanmin rummaged through the pile of beer cans. Gangwoo picked up the round silver-framed glasses that had fallen by his feet and held them out. With the glasses on, Hanmin’s eyes looked smaller than bean sprout heads.
“What are you doing here this early? Didn’t we say you’d come at night?”
“Just……. Since I was up early, I thought we could have breakfast together.”
He shook the bag of food again. Hanmin stretched his philtrum long with a look of reluctance. You know I don’t have any friends. Looking away from him, Gangwoo added, lukewarm and trailing off.
“Get over here.”
Perching on the edge of the bed, Hanmin abruptly grabbed Gangwoo by the collar and yanked him closer. He was still wearing his doctor’s coat — he must have downed alcohol the moment clinic hours were over and passed out before changing. On most men, the smell of stale sweat would have been at its absolute peak, but from him there was only the smell of beer.
Because he’s an omega? Gangwoo thought, watching Hanmin slide a thumb under the glasses and pull down his lower eyelid to examine the conjunctiva.
He didn’t bother putting the thought into words. Say something like that first thing in the morning and the treatment he was about to receive would become several times more miserable. The mountain madman that even the thief Jerry tiptoed around in the old district — that was Kim Internal Medicine’s director, Kim Hanmin.
“Damn it, you’re practically at death’s door. What did I tell you? Put the job off and get your treatment first……”
He released Gangwoo’s collar like he was throwing something away, and the mountain madman growled. Unkempt hair fell across his forehead and over his shoulders. As Hanmin gathered it up with a rubber band from his wrist and readied himself to launch into a lecture, Gangwoo quickly thrust the hangover soup from the bag toward him.
“What’s the point of coming to the clinic if you’re going to go dig your own grave out back? What good is a doctor when his patient is like this day in and day out?”
“Sorry. Yesterday was the Baekjungs tide, so I had no choice. It was the perfect day to pull a job.”
A good smell drifted enticingly from the bribe. Just the scent of it settled his stomach. Hanmin clicked his tongue once, then crossed his arms.
“The money?”
“Right here.”
Gangwoo patted his front pocket and grinned. The forty million won brought from the safe was the treatment fee. He regularly blew through every last won he earned from stealing at this clinic.
Forty million won per session. A preposterous amount. But if he thought of it as buying hope, he could pay it willingly. Having an expensive medication was a hundred times better than having none at all.
“Go to the exam room and wait while I get ready. We’ll eat after the treatment.”
Hanmin plucked the container of hangover soup from his hand and got to his feet. Gangwoo protested that he couldn’t eat first, but Hanmin paid him no mind whatsoever, insisting that treatment was most effective on an empty stomach.
Hanmin went to the kitchen to put the food away while Gangwoo went into the exam room. He stacked the bundles of cash on the desk and took off his shirt, placing it beside them.
The foam dressing taped to his left shoulder had bloated white with seepage. But there was something else that drew the eye.
Not under the dim lighting of the manpower agency, but in the harsh summer sunlight — every bruise and scar on his skin was laid completely bare. With the exception of a fist-sized scar that ran from above his right chest up across his collarbone, all of them were injection marks from the treatment process.
“I’m going to need a bit more than you usually bring today.”
Hanmin said as he walked into the exam room. He never joked about money.
“Why? Isn’t forty million enough?”
He knew Kim Internal Medicine only charged cost price, but an irritable reaction slipped out involuntarily. Forty million won a week, fifty-two weeks a year — a minimum of two billion eighty million won flew out the door in treatment fees annually. An amount like that would make anyone sensitive about the cost of medicine, rich or poor alike.
